Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.

I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha

> It was a weird place to work

What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?

> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

For context, can you please talk more about it :p

> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though

What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?

Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?

> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.

Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations.

> What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?

I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads.

And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place.

I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)